


On Approach

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 22:39:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5351000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bridge between LSOTW and SOTW, apparently. God bless Nick Roche for reigniting my love of Transformers comicsverse.  For TF rare pairing 'Any Wrecker/Verity: disapproval'</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Approach

It wasn’t till they reached Rura Penthe that Perceptor worked up the--what was it? courage? nerve?--to chime Verity’s door.  He hadn’t seen her in days; hadn’t heard a sound from her since the door had shushed shut with that sound he knew she wished could be a good, solid, American-door style slam. 

There was no sound, now, either: Perceptor could hear the chime through the door, sounding strangely desolate.  

He knew she was in there. She had to be.  There had simply been no place to go.  “Verity?” 

Still silence. 

“Verity. I will come in there.” A threat, but more to himself than her.  He wasn’t ready to do this.  In the lab, and even in the battlefield, he could handle things. He could handle himself. There were rules in combat, just as there were rules in science: Brownian motion, averages, vectors and windage. Combat could be calculate.  High stakes math, he’d joked, once, to Ironfist. When he still tried to joke. 

But emotions.  Emotions were unpredictable. No math, no algorithm, nothing could predict them. He felt defenseless against them, despite his reinforced chassis armor.  

A slight sound from inside, and then, a moment later, the door opened, whispering aside. 

Verity’s eyes were red--a fine lacework of veins over the whites of her eyes, the lids puffed pink and sore looking, each eyelash sticking out like a spine. “What.” Verity’s voice was flat, the tone Perceptor knew himself, the sound a voice makes when you haven’t spoken in too long. 

“We’re nearly to Rura Penthe.”  

“Another prison.”  

“Verity.” He could feel the hammered lead in her voice. “They have better medical facilities here. And...we have a prisoner.” 

“Prisoner.” The lead seemed to melt, abruptly, into red heat. “Should kill him, for what he’s done.” 

What he’d done was a list too long for even Perceptor to want to contemplate.  

“It won’t bring them back,” he offered, gently. 

“I don’t care! I know that.”  She shook her head, greasy strands of black hair sliding across her face. “But he’d be  dead. ” 

“He’s probably worse off the way he is.”  From what Perceptor had figured, Overlord could see and hear and think. Just...not move.  For someone like him, it would be worse than the pit--an eternity of helplessness.  

“Oh, don’t give me that crap. They say that on Earth, too, that a guy with a life sentence has it worse than a death-penalty guy.  Thing is, that only works if the guy has a conscience to begin with.” She pointed an accusing finger up at him. “If not, all you’ve done is give him a new fucking puzzle to figure out.” 

Her mouth settled itself, but it seemed surer now. “I want to see him.”

“Verity. I don’t think that’s a good--”

“Don’t remember asking what you thought, Perceptor.”  Springer’s intonation, his phrasing, even.  Or maybe Perceptor’s own guilt was summoning the resemblance--it was hard to tell, in a ship thick with the sound of stasis pods. 

She turned on her heel, into the room’s shadow, and came out a moment later, cramming her hair under a soft knit cap.  

When Perceptor didn’t move, she poked his shinguard. “If he’s as safe as you say, it’s not like he can hurt me, right?” She shrugged. “Think we already established I’m no threat to him.”  

She wasn’t going to let it go: he knew her long enough and well enough to know that. He sighed, half to buy some time before giving in. “Very well. And then,” he said, walking slowly, more slowly than she needed him to, “we will deposit him at Rura Penthe.”  

 

Whatever plans she’d had to see him--hasty and half-formed as they’d been--she lost them as the door spiraled open.  They’d kept him in a side hangar, nowhere near the capsules containing the Wreckers. Even now, not entirely ‘safe’.  Not entirely trusted. 

Verity could feel the cold of space leeching in from the walls, her breath turning from vapor to powder almost instantly.  A thin frost laced over Overlord’s broken body, and she found herself counting the steps from foot to head, just for something to fill her mind, to push aside the fear she felt trying to swarm up from her belly. It was the instinctive fear of prey in presence of a predator, and the tangled fear of someone who had seen her friends die in front of her.  

And there, at last, his face, locked in a rictus of something like shock. Yeah, she thought, it can happen to you, too, asshole. Can happen to anyone.  She hoped it hurt like hell, hoped every one of his pain sensors was on the verge of short circuit. No, she thought, maybe blown entirely, so he can’t feel his body at all, just one great big hulking numbness. 

Like she felt. 

She waited...for something. A sound, a sign, a flick of movement that showed he was there, aware of her. 

Silence. 

Stillness.  

And the silence and stillness grew, swelling to fill the space. Some kind of chemistry rule, she thought. Boyle’s law, maybe, that one about pressure and expansion and gases or whatever: Perceptor would know. 

She was stalling, filling her mind with inconsequential anythings. Well, Verity, she thought. You wanted to be here. You wanted to see him.  And now you’re here, and he’s there and….

“Fuck you.” She spat the words at the immobile, frost-mazed frame, because she needed to say something, needed some sound to fill the volume of this space, as if she could mark it with her hatred, surround him with it. 

The words were inadequate, and unoriginal and lame, but, she thought, the cold stiffening her cheeks, turning a tear into a glittering powder, he didn’t deserve any more of her energy. 

 

It was impossible--for Perceptor, at least--to not look like he hadn’t been watching her in there, so Perceptor didn’t even try.  “We’re almost docked.”

She nodded, scrubbing the cap off her head, her hair falling in black strings by her face. “Time for a shower first?”

“Yes.” He could make time, double check the docking checklist. “Ultra Magnus has commed. He will be there to meet us.  And Overlord.” 

“Definitely a shower, then.” Verity’s face scrunched.  

“Advisable.”  

They walked away from the hangar. If only they could walk away from the consequences as easily as they could move from Overlord’s body, he thought. 

“We--the Wreckers--we’re over, aren’t we?” Verity’s voice was soft, her dark hair swept over, covering her face. 

“Perhaps it’s best,” Perceptor said.  “The war is changing.”  

“I just...it was the first time I belonged, anywhere. Or felt like I did.”  

“Yes.” Him, too. He remembered what it felt like, both the loneliness before and how it felt, later, to be part of something, reliable, relied on and relying on others. And now it was gone, all of it, and the only thing he could be relied on to do was to see everyone safely home.  And then...what?  He didn’t know.  He’d avoided thinking about it.  

But Verity clearly was. “Back to the lab with you, then, huh?” 

“I suppose.” He didn’t have the spark to fight again. It wasn’t combat he couldn’t face, it was...everything else.  “And you to Earth.” 

“Yeah,” she said, and first her voice was glum, someone who had been plucked out of ordinary life into something vivid and strange, and then sent back to the colorless world of before as though unchanged. And then, “Yeah,” she repeated, with something like determination this time, and he saw her hand slip into a pocket, and squeeze tight. 

  
  



End file.
